Iraq

REPUBLICAN IRAQ

The Hashimite monarchy was overthrown on July 14, 1958, in a
swift, predawn coup executed by officers of the Nineteenth
Brigade under the leadership of Brigadier Abd al Karim Qasim and
Colonel Abd as Salaam Arif. The coup was triggered when King
Hussein, fearing that an anti-Western revolt in Lebanon might
spread to Jordan, requested Iraqi assistance. Instead of moving
toward Jordan, however, Colonel Arif led a battalion into Baghdad
and immediately proclaimed a new republic and the end of the old
regime. The July 14 Revolution met virtually no opposition and
proclamations of the revolution brought crowds of people into the
streets of Baghdad cheering for the deaths of Iraq's two "strong
men," Nuri as Said and Abd al Ilah. King Faisal II and Abd al
Ilah were executed, as were many others in the royal family. Nuri
as Said also was killed after attempting to escape disguised as a
veiled woman. In the ensuing mob demonstrations against the old
order, angry crowds severely damaged the British embassy.

Put in its historical context, the July 14 Revolution was the
culmination of a series of uprisings and coup attempts that began
with the 1936 Bakr Sidqi coup and included the 1941 Rashid Ali
military movement, the 1948 Wathbah Uprising, and the 1952 and
1956 protests. The revolution radically altered Iraq's social
structure, destroying the power of the landed shaykhs and the
absentee landlords while enhancing the position of the urban
workers, the peasants, and the middle class. In altering the old
power structure, however, the revolution revived long-suppressed
sectarian, tribal, and ethnic conflicts. The strongest of these
conflicts were those between Kurds and Arabs and between Sunnis
and Shias.

Despite a shared military background, the group of
Free Officers (see Glossary)
that carried out the July 14 Revolution
was plagued by internal dissension. Its members lacked both a
coherent ideology and an effective organizational structure. Many
of the more senior officers resented having to take orders from
Arif, their junior in rank. A power struggle developed between
Qasim and Arif over joining the Egyptian-Syrian union. Arif's
pro-Nasserite sympathies were supported by the Baath Party, while
Qasim found support for his anti-union position in the ranks of
the communists. Qasim, the more experienced and higher ranking of
the two, eventually emerged victorious. Arif was first dismissed,
then brought to trial for treason and condemned to death in
January 1959; he was subsequently pardoned in December 1962.

Whereas he implemented many reforms that favored the poor,
Qasim was primarily a centrist in outlook, proposing to improve
the lot of the poor while not dispossessing the wealthy. In part,
his ambiguous policies were a product of his lack of a solid base
of support, especially in the military. Unlike the bulk of
military officers, Qasim did not come from the Arab Sunni
northwestern towns nor did he share their enthusiasm for pan-
Arabism: he was of mixed Sunni-Shia parentage from southeastern
Iraq. Qasim's ability to remain in power depended, therefore, on
a skillful balancing of the communists and the pan-Arabists. For
most of his tenure, Qasim sought to counterbalance the growing
pan-Arab trend in the military by supporting the communists who
controlled the streets. He authorized the formation of a
communist-controlled militia, the People's Resistance Force, and
he freed all communist prisoners.

Qasim's economic policies reflected his poor origins and his
ties with the communists. He permitted trade unions, improved
workers' conditions, and implemented land reform aimed at
dismantling the old feudal structure of the countryside. Qasim
also challenged the existing profit-sharing arrangements with the
oil companies. On December 11, 1961, he passed Public Law 80,
which dispossessed the IPC of 99.5 percent of its concession
area, leaving it to operate only in those areas currently in
production. The new arrangement significantly increased oil
revenues accruing to the government. Qasim also announced the
establishment of an Iraq National Oil Company (INOC) to exploit
the new territory.

In March 1959, a group of disgruntled Free Officers, who came
from conservative, well-known, Arab Sunni families and who
opposed Qasim's increasing links with the communists, attempted a
coup. Aware of the planned coup, Qasim had his communist allies
mobilize 250,000 of their supporters in Mosul. The ill-planned
coup attempt never really materialized and, in its aftermath, the
communists massacred nationalists and some well-to-do Mosul
families, leaving deep scars that proved to be very slow to heal.

Throughout 1959 the ranks of the ICP swelled as the party
increased its presence in both the military and the government.
In 1959 Qasim reestablished diplomatic relations between Iraq and
Moscow, an extensive Iraqi-Soviet economic agreement was signed,
and arms deliveries began. With communist fortunes riding high,
another large-scale show of force was planned in Kirkuk, where a
significant number of Kurds (many of them either members of, or
sympathetic to, the ICP) lived in neighborhoods contiguous to a
Turkoman upper class. In Kirkuk, however, communist rallies got
out of hand. A bloody battle ensued, and the Kurds looted and
killed many Turkomans. The communist-initiated violence at Kirkuk
led Qasim to crack down on the organization, by arresting some of
the more unruly rank-and-file members and by temporarily
suspending the People's Resistance Force. Following the events at
Mosul and at Kirkuk, the Baath and its leader, Fuad Rikabi,
decided that the only way to dislodge the Qasim regime would be
to kill Qasim
(see Coups, Coup Attempts, and Foreign Policy
, this
ch.). The future president, Saddam Husayn, carried out the
attempted assassination, which injured Qasim but failed to kill
him. Qasim reacted by softening his stance on the communists and
by suppressing the activities of the Baath and other nationalist
parties. The renewed communist-Qasim relationship did not last
long, however. Throughout 1960 and 1961, sensing that the
communists had become too strong, Qasim again moved against the
party by eliminating members from sensitive government positions,
by cracking down on trade unions and on peasant associations, and
by shutting down the communist press.

Qasim's divorce from the communists, his alienation from the
nationalists, his aloof manner, and his monopoly of power--he was
frequently referred to as the "sole leader"--isolated him from a
domestic power base. In 1961 his tenuous hold on power was
further weakened when the Kurds again took up arms against the
central government.

The Kurds had ardently supported the 1958 revolution. Indeed,
the new constitution put forth by Qasim and Arif had stipulated
that the Kurds and the Arabs would be equal partners in the new
state. Exiled Kurdish leaders, including Mullah Mustafa Barzani,
were allowed to return. Mutual suspicions, however, soon soured
the Barzani-Qasim relationship; in September 1961, full-scale
fighting broke out between Kurdish guerrillas and the Iraqi army.
The army did not fare well against the seasoned Kurdish
guerrillas, many of whom had deserted from the army. By the
spring of 1962, Qasim's inability to contain the Kurdish
insurrection had further eroded his base of power. The growing
opposition was now in a position to plot his overthrow.

Qasim's domestic problems were compounded by a number of
foreign policy crises, the foremost of which was an escalating
conflict with the shah of Iran. Although he had reined in the
communists, Qasim's leftist sympathies aroused fears in the West
and in neighboring Gulf states of an imminent communist takeover
of Iraq. In April 1959, Allen Dulles, the director of the United
States Central Intelligence Agency, described the situation in
Iraq "as the most dangerous in the world." The pro-Western shah
found Qasim's communist sympathies and his claims on Iranian
Khuzestan (an area that stretched from Dezful to Ahvaz in Iran
and that contained a majority of Iranians of Arab descent) to be
anathema. In December 1959, Iraqi-Iranian relations rapidly
deteriorated when Qasim, reacting to Iran's reopening of the
Shatt al Arab dispute, nullified the 1937 agreement and claimed
sovereignty over the anchorage area near Abadan. In July 1961,
Qasim further alienated the West and pro-Western regional states
by laying claim to the newly independent state of Kuwait. When
the Arab League unanimously accepted Kuwait's membership, Iraq
broke off diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors. Qasim was
completely isolated.

In February 1963, hemmed in by regional enemies and facing
Kurdish insurrection in the north and a growing nationalist
movement at home, Qasim was overthrown. Despite the long list of
enemies who opposed him in his final days, Qasim was a hero to
millions of urban poor and impoverished peasants, many of whom
rushed to his defense.

The inability of the masses to stave off the nationalist
onslaught attested to the near total divorce of the Iraqi people
from the political process. From the days of the monarchy, the
legitimacy of the political process had suffered repeated blows.
The government's British legacy, Nuri as Said's authoritarianism,
and the rapid encroachment of the military (who paid only scant
homage to the institutions of state) had eroded the people's
faith in the government; furthermore, Qasim's inability to stem
the increasing ethnic, sectarian, and class-inspired violence
reflected an even deeper malaise. The unraveling of Iraq's
traditional social structure upset a precarious balance of social
forces. Centuries-old religious and sectarian hatreds now
combined with more recent class antagonisms in a volatile mix.